When Difference Is Mistaken for Damage
When Difference Is Mistaken for Damage
When Difference Is Mistaken for Damage
by Darren Palmer
In late 2025, BBC Future published an article describing Mercury as the planet that shouldn’t exist.
The phrasing is not literal. Mercury is obviously there. What the article really reveals is something more interesting — and more human.
Mercury and the urge to explain damage
Mercury does not sit comfortably within existing models of planetary formation. It is unusually dense. Its iron core is disproportionately large. Its chemistry resists tidy explanation.
And so, for decades, scientists have searched for a cause — usually a dramatic one — to explain why Mercury looks the way it does.
Was it struck by a colossal impact?
Was its mantle stripped away?
Was something done to it?
The assumption comes first: this shouldn’t look like this.
The explanation follows: there must have been damage.
This reflex is not unique to planetary science.
The reflex we rarely notice
Across disciplines, the same pattern repeats:
If something doesn’t fit → assume damage
If it resists explanation → invent a missing event
If it persists → call it an anomaly
Only later do we admit something quieter and more uncomfortable:
Our expectations were narrow.
Mercury exposes this reflex in astrophysics. Archaeology exposes it just as clearly.
When evidence is present, but ignored
For decades, numerous burials containing weapons, tools, or professional equipment were confidently classified as male. Not cautiously. Not tentatively. Automatically.
When osteological evidence later indicated female sex, acceptance was rarely immediate. Instead, interpretations bent around the assumption.
The tools were symbolic.
The role was ceremonial.
The equipment belonged to a husband.
The burial was “exceptional.”
The evidence was not missing. It was simply inconvenient.
What if Mercury just is?
Another probe has been sent to Mercury — not because it is broken, but because it is still not understood on its own terms.
We now know that Mercury-like planets — iron-rich, dense, compact — exist around other stars. Their existence proves something essential:
So the question quietly changes.
Not what broke Mercury?
But why are we so sure it needed breaking?
The simplest explanation remains available:
Mercury formed as it is.
Not damaged. Not incomplete. Just different.
Difference is not deviation
This is where the discussion stops being about planets.
The same reflex appears wherever humans encounter difference — cultures, social systems, bodies, identities, lives.
Difference is repeatedly framed as deviation: something that must be corrected, justified, or explained away.
We ask what went wrong. We search for disruption. We invent missing events.
We rarely ask the simpler question:
Equality Without Distinction
Equality Without Distinction does not argue that everything is the same. It argues that difference does not require apology.
Mercury does not need to resemble Earth to be legitimate.
A burial does not need to match expectation to be professional.
A culture does not need to modernise along a single path to be coherent.
A person does not need to conform to justify their existence.
The problem has never been difference.
A quieter way of knowing
Science advances not by defending assumptions, but by surviving their collapse. History improves not by refining narratives, but by relinquishing them when they fail.
Understanding deepens not when everything is explained — but when we stop forcing everything to explain itself.
Mercury does not argue back. Ancient remains do not protest. People, however, live with the consequences.
Some things are simply formed differently.
That is where understanding begins.
Context
This reflex — mistaking difference for damage — appears repeatedly wherever evidence challenges expectation.
I have written elsewhere about the same pattern in archaeology and historical interpretation, particularly where confidence preceded caution and narrative preceded evidence.
• When Evidence Allows More Than One Story
• The Author’s Voice
